Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday March 15, 2013 @05:21AM
from the one-size-does-not-fit-all dept.

vu1986 writes "With the latest updates — announced in a blog post by BigQuery Product Manager Ku-kay Kwek on Thursday — users can now join large tables, import and query timestamped data, and aggregate large collections of distinct values. It's hardly the equivalent of Google launching Compute Engine last summer, but as (arguably) the inspiration for the SQL-on-Hadoop trend that's sweeping the big data world right now, every improvement to BigQuery is notable."

You'd be some idiot to build a business on the back of a service that might disappear. At least with the IaaS providers you have some hope of being able to recover should the service provider decide they no longer want to support their service, because you can shift your application to new infrastructure. If you're tied into the Google world-view, you're only a short blogpost away from seeing your business threatened.

Googles business is advertisement. All other products are just vehicles to get Google to place advertisement. All the development of cool products are because they have billions of dollars at hand, probably one of the largest budgets of any software company. Their strategy is to fund many small startup-like ideas generously, and later, equally generously, throw away the ones that don't work for them. Googles income, unlike Microsoft or Apples, does not depend on the software working for you, it only depends on placing advertisement for you to see.In the process of acquiring startups and developing, they accumulate patents, so even when Google drops an idea, you have to approach them for continuing that idea.Quite smart.Probably not the most efficient way for a company to producing software, but a way of not getting stuck with project management issues.

Which is why I was shocked that they killed Google Reader. That thing can be a gold mine of information that can be used to create targeted advertising. They can monitor very easily what things I'm interested by my subscriptions and the things I tag and share. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Apparently, Google felt otherwise. I don't feel like I can trust Google to support something given their current record. Reader is just one example but a pretty glaring one in my

Try coming home and finding your house empty (!) and wife and kids gone to another country. Now that's deception. I know a few people who enjoyed this experience.

"If you're tied into the $Service world-view" any business that takes a conscious business decision like that needs to carefully look at the benefits vs the risk.

What about Google ?
Q: Have they ever closed a paying service ?
Q: If so, have they done it in a way that would make you lose your data ? Or put you in a situation where you had no alternative in reasonable time ?

I have used online paid services that have stopped working, without notification, even after the closure, kept billing me, without providing support.
I have paid solutions sometimes several 1000 $ without getting a single support answer when encountering problems.

I don't mind using a service if
* it has alternatives
* I can easily extract the data

A service is like any job or relationship. It can end at any moment. The way it ends is as important as the way it operates. I trust Google on at least ending their services properly. From my knowledge they have a good track record. Google Reader is a good example. Free, 3.5 months notice, open data, several alternatives available. I really don't understand why people complain.

I have used online paid services that have stopped working, without notification, even after the closure, kept billing me, without providing support. I have paid solutions sometimes several 1000 $ without getting a single support answer when encountering problems.

1. Hotwebsluts.com does not constitute a true web service.2. They do not provide support for ED. Call your doctor.

Google Reader was free for 8 years. It has definitely by my favorite RSS software out there. We have 4 months to get our data out of reader (they give it to us in an easy to process JSON file).

A lot of people saw the writing on the wall about Reader. No blog posts from them in 1.5 years. Removing functionality so it didn't compete with Google+. Increased aggressiveness in Google Spring Cleaning. This day was coming, it was just a matter of when.

Here let me hit my time machine button for a sec.... yep... just as I thought. Everyone said the same damn thing about Microsoft 15 years ago. The same thing about Oracle 10 years ago. The same thing was said for just about every proprietary system and vendor over the years.

people are not jumping ship on oracle MySQL as oracle has not upset the boat to much yet. There are starting to be cracks in that though so when they get around to "monetizing" MySQL people will leave in droves. Some early adopters of MariaDB or other databases seem to be anticipating this and to be honest based on oracle's track record it does not seem like a bad assumption. oracle would rather have complete and dominant control instead of making money.

I totally agree with hmmm, building a business on a service that might (and in time deffinitly) disappear is crazy.
This is for every remote service. I have the same problem for a business of mine (CloudFormz [cloudformz.com]).
I would like to add the DropBox API for example so all file uploads are uploaded to DropBox. But what if the api stops working or even worse, DropBox stops it service?
Then you get a lot of angry customers and you have no way to retrieve your data. (sorry for my English grammar).
Do you have any fail

BigQuery isn't sold as a replacement for traditional SQL databases, or as "the be all and end all of IT services and methodologies" (or even "...all database-like services and methodologies", as Google also has several other cloud database services for different uses, most notably the MySQL-based CloudSQL), its a data analysis platform for large data sets that uses an SQL-like query syntax.

As a large data set analysis platform, its optimized for that use case, including the foc